The three way tonal system of Sylheti

The Phonetics of Tone and Voice Quality Interactions in Sylheti

“…3 Gope (2016) first claimed that the tonogenesis in Sylheti is indeed triggered by the loss of underlying aspiration in the obstruents; the process of fricativization and deaffrication of the obstruents was just a simultenous process and did not have much role in the formation of tonal contrasts in this language. The study by Raychoudhury and Mahanta (2020) further confirmed this claim. Note that, most of the high tone words considered in this study contained the feature (−voice, +aspiration).…”

“…, and [bà t "] 'arthritis') (Gope 2016(Gope , 2018Gope and Mahanta 2015). In a recent study, Raychoudhury and Mahanta (2020) reported that the loss of aspiration in the voiceless segments occurring in (different) onset positions, viz., in the first or the second syllable of a disyllabic word, might trigger a threeway lexical contrast in Sylheti. The study claims that a high tone is surfaced following the loss of the feature (−voice, −asp.)…”